“Raithe!” I cried out to him. “What’s happening? Raithe!”
Eventually, the roots reached my mouth, muffling my voice, cutting off my cries. Then they climbed over my eyes, stealing my sight. The last thing I saw before darkness claimed me was Raithe’s face, shouting for me. His powerlessness to stop it.
The roots swallowed me completely. My body went still, the numbness spreading like cold through my limbs. My thoughts scattered in a whirlwind of fear and confusion, but before everything slipped away, one moment played back in my mind like an echo on repeat.
Hadeon’s words were masking a darker truth.
You truly are something worth bargaining for.
48
There’sa particular feeling that settles in when regret comes to take hold. It isn’t just one emotion, it’s a storm of them. Sadness. Disappointment. The sting of failure. The ache of inaction. The heavy burden of self-blame. The list spirals endlessly.
But not everything in my life has earned that kind of pain. I don’t regret my upbringing, or the scars I’ve carried with me. I don’t regret the day I wandered into the market and caught the eye of the Hyrallean prince. I don’t regret the long shifts at the Greenwood Inn, or even meeting Caz.
What I do regret is not answering Torhiel’s call at twelve.
To the other demigods, it was seen as either an act of strength or stupidity. For me, it felt more like the latter.
In the dark, I couldn’t see. Couldn’t feel. Couldn’t hear. But I could still think. All I could think was, if I had answered Torhiel sooner, maybe I could’ve resisted whatever Hadeon did to me. Maybe I would’ve been stronger. Ready.
Raithe told me I still had much to learn about Torhiel. He was right. I’d only just begun to grasp the nature of my divinity. Time in this placewas elusive, if it even existed at all. Days fractured here, moments bled into each other. It was impossible to grasp how long anything truly lasted.
But Raithe had felt Hadeon’s presence. He understood the danger in a way I didn’t yet. He moved through this realm with instincts I hadn’t learned, as if the world spoke to him in a language I couldn’t hear. Did he gain that as a child? Was he raised here, shaped by the threats that hid in every shadow? Was survival something he had to learn from the start?
If Hadeon had lived for centuries, and all my siblings had fallen with time, then Torhiel didn’t reward strength, she demanded it.
The Ossirae might have granted us a chance, an opening into who we could become, but it didn’t protect us. It didn’t care if we succeeded. It never promised survival.
How many of us had disappeared from faded ossiraen, from ill-made bargains, or cut down by the hands of other demigods? I’d seen hundreds of god-trees in the Ossarith, each tied to a soul. But how many more withered and fell long before I ever arrived?
Immortality, I’d come to realize, was a test. And it had to be earned, again and again.
Now, I knew one of those tests had begun.
The moment my senses returned, the moment I opened my eyes, I would be forced to fight. It would be life or death. There would be no middle ground.
I’d spent my life sharpening a different kind of instinct. A quiet, watchful pessimism. The habit of always bracing for the worst. Of scanning the horizon for disaster before it struck. It had protected me before.
But not this time.
This time, it failed me.
Because I didn’t see the truth until it was too late. I recognized the danger only as it was already closing in on me.
Slowly, my senses began to return, one by one, piece by piece. The roots that had wrapped around my face, swallowing me whole, started to pull back. They loosened, like vines retreating into the earth.
Sight came first. Then sound. Then strength began to stir in my limbs.
Even as my body awakened, the darkness lingered. I was still surrounded by it.
Then I heard Hadeon’s voice, though not through my ears, but deep in my mind. He was speaking to someone I couldn’t make out. His Vengeance pressed in around me, thick and heady. For the briefest moment, it felt like Raithe’s. Something almost familiar, almost safe. But that moment didn’t last. That warmth shifted, overtaken by something older, colder, and far more ancient. Whatever comfort I’d felt slipped away with it.
“Daughter of Wrath,” Hadeon whispered, the words reaching my ears this time. “Come to me.”
I blinked. A faint light broke through the darkness behind my eyes. It was still dim, but with each blink, the shadows began to lift. The first thing I saw was the stone floor, and my heart clenched.
No, this can’t be happening.
